How to Create an Awesome See-Through Water Horse in Photoshop

Step 7

Create a new layer by pressing Ctrl + Shift + Alt + N and press Alt + Backspace to fill the selection with the foreground color. It doesn’t really matter what color it is.

Step 8.

Name the layer you created on the previous step “Horse Glue” (sounds strange but this will be the layer that will glue together all the splashes of water and make it feel like a real horse and not just some random drops of water) or any other name and double click on it to enter the Advanced Blending Options screen. Here I want you to drop the Fill to 0% and the Opacity to 75%. In case you didn’t know Fill controls the opacity of the layer itself while Opacity controls the opacity of the layer and of the layer effects together. So if you lower the Fill to 0% the color that you used to fill the horse selection with and that represents the pixels of the layer will be rendered invisible but the future layer effects will be fully visible. Cool, huh?

Step 9

Now check the Inner Glow box and use the settings you see below. Noticed that I chose a light cyan-blue color that will best suit our water horse. Once you are done press Ok.

Step 10

You can see below that now we have a foundation on which we will build our water structure. In the next step I will explain you haw to select drops of water and we will start building the water horse.

Step 11

Open file “Splash2” and choose Select > Color Range. Click once in the area pointed below until the preview in your little screen on the Color Range window looks like mine below. Basically we are trying to select as much as possible of the white water splash without selecting other stuff. The preview in the little screen shows us what selection we have made by using the same principle as a layer mask: white reveals and black conceals. So everything white will be selected and black will not be selected. Gray means that the selection will be partial. The Color Range works by selecting pixels based on the place you click. So if you clicked in the area shown below it will try to select only the white splash without the green water surface or the plants. Don’t be afraid to click multiple times until you obtain the desired effect. Once you’re done click Ok and you will have a selection.

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